Beyond Coloniality

Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition

Aaron Kamugisha

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253036292
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

Against the lethargy and despair of the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean experience, Aaron Kamugisha gives a powerful argument for advancing Caribbean radical thought as an answer to the conundrums of the present. Beyond Coloniality is an extended meditation on Caribbean thought and freedom at the beginning of the 21st century and a profound rejection of the postindependence social and political organization of the Anglophone Caribbean and its contentment with neocolonial arrangements of power. Kamugisha provides a dazzling reading of two towering figures of the Caribbean intellectual tradition, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their quest for human freedom beyond coloniality. Ultimately, he urges the Caribbean to recall and reconsider the radicalism of its most distinguished 20th-century thinkers in order to imagine a future beyond neocolonialism.

1 Beyond Caribbean Coloniality

THE CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN—an area of experience that so many of its dispossessed citizens have given their lives and hearts to in the hope of social transformation—is in a state of tragedy and crisis, destroyed and corrupted by a postcolonial malaise wedded to neocolonialism. This state of affairs is hardly unique and may well be seen as the condition of much of the postcolonial world, two generations after the promise of the Bandung Conference, which pointed to a horizon of true self-determination for people emerging from colonialism, and fifty years after the Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the greatest summit ever held in the region against empire.¹ Ato Sekyi-Otu’s reading of Frantz Fanon in his Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, perhaps the most discerning interpretation of the last century’s most influential anticolonial thinker, captures our condition in the most prescient manner: “After all, what is our situation? An omnivorous transnational capital that requires local political agencies to discipline their populace into acquiescing to its draconian measures; a free market of material and cultural commodities whose necessary condition of existence is the authoritarian state; the incoherent nationalism of dominant elites who are in reality transmitters and enforcers of capital’s coercive universals: that is our historical situation.”²

Sekyi-Otu’s return to Fanon in order to comprehend, as an African intellectual, “three blighted decades of postcolonial existence” shares the intent and practice of this meditation on the contemporary Caribbean.³ The story about the Caribbean’s retreat from a moment striving for revolutionary coherence in the 1970s to the decline and lethargy of our time is often tied to the advent of global neoliberalism, a global story in which we are all enmeshed. My claim, here though, is that the term neoliberalism flattens the complexity of the Caribbean’s current moment.⁴ Rather, in the Caribbean we see an amalgam of neocolonialism, postcolonial elite domination, and neoliberalism, which have undermined the conditions of possibility for any kind of social democracy—far less the democratic-socialist experiments of a generation ago. We are thus left with antiworker states seduced and secured by client politics and a lurking ruthless authoritarianism. That is our political moment in the Caribbean and the terrain of struggle of this book, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition.

Between 1979 and 1983, there was an extraordinary idealism and enthusiastic boldness of commitment right through the region. Those four years did something to ignite and activate people in all kinds of fields. But the tragedy that [the Grenada] Revolution took such a fall, it traumatized the left—and we have not yet quite recovered the meaning of that event.

George Lamming interviewed by Paul Buhle (1987)⁵

It is by now well acknowledged that political regimes in the Anglophone Caribbean have what Paget Henry has wryly termed “high legitimacy deficits.”⁶ Practically every political theorist in the Anglophone Caribbean has used the language of crisis to describe the sociopolitical condition of the contemporary Caribbean state, from Brian Meeks’s “hegemonic dissolution,” to Holger Henke’s diagnosis of a “severe moral and ethical crisis,” Anthony Bogues’s Caribbean “postcolony,” Obika Gray’s “predation politics,” and Selwyn Ryan’s worry over the sustainability of democratic governance.⁷ This contemporary moment of crisis has been attributed to a series of events in the last four decades of which the 1983 end of the Grenada revolution stands as a significant landmark. The Grenada revolution was principally a movement by the people of that island for self-determination beyond the confines of neocolonialism. It was also the most critical stand made by a regional leftist movement against empire in the postindependence era, and activists from all over the region lent their support toward its survival. Grenada also engendered a form of internationalism seldom seen in the postindependence Anglophone Caribbean, with activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) visiting, sharing their experiences, and declaring their solidarity with the movement.⁸ The end of the Grenada revolution not only scattered the Caribbean Left across the region and throughout the Caribbean diaspora but, as Lamming notes, traumatized the Left and fatally undermined its ability to advance any revolutionary overthrow of the neocolonial state in the postindependence Caribbean. The collapse of Grenada, coming after the murder of Walter Rodney and the electoral defeat of Michael Manley in 1980, was followed by a decade of structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank and ended with the collapse of authoritarian governments in eastern Europe, soon to be followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Staggering from structural adjustment to neoliberal globalization in the decade that followed, with a Left transformed or vanished and technocratic governments in place that would have been denounced as apologists for local and global apartheid two decades previously, the legitimacy crisis of the Caribbean state is not hard to perceive.⁹ This has been the context of our struggle in the region over the last generation.

This account of the experience of the preceding forty years, in which Grenada represents the great moment of decline from a radical Caribbean striving for freedom, is a popular one, but with definite limits.¹⁰ Since the end of the Grenada revolution, we have seen a collapse of efforts to capture the state and deploy it as the means to effect radical social change in the Caribbean. However, we have seen a flowering and deepening of claims to a postcolonial citizenship barely imaginable in the heady days of socialist experimentation. This suggests that rather than a tale of incomprehensible decline, we should instead be alert to the changing contours of the demands surrounding postcolonial citizenship in the last generation and their implications for an analysis of the Caribbean’s present and potential futures.

The challenge, as with all engagements with the social world, is complex. I agree with the many members of the Caribbean intelligentsia who suggest that the Caribbean is enmeshed in crisis and echo the bewilderment felt by so many over the seeming absence of political will from nonstate actors to transform the region and the incredible diminution of and lethargy within the Left. How could one not argue the case that global neoliberalism since the beginning of the 1980s has severely damaged not just regional economies but imaginations, the very dreams of transformation articulated in the past? Is it possible not to wilt before the searing argument that the steady march of Western consumerist individualism in the Caribbean has made past inspired programs of self-sufficiency as familiar today as artifacts of a forgotten millennia-old civilization? Yet the constant language of doubt misses transformations as acute in their possibility for new futures as the previous litany of setbacks engenders despair.

Principal among these has been the outpouring of an incredible array of multidisciplinary, genre-defying activism and work by (and on behalf of) Caribbean women, their lives, and Caribbean gender relations.¹¹ The dazzling talent of Caribbean women writers was evident before the 1980s, but the presence of many new writers from 1980 onward would transform the Caribbean literary landscape utterly and fundamentally.¹² In the arena of social and political thought, Caribbean feminisms have not only made signal contributions to every pressing field of inquiry—including political economy, citizenship, historiography, the law, race and ethnic studies, and labor history—but their contributions have been the key to unmasking the ruses of postcolonial citizenship.¹³ Caribbean feminisms thus constitute the single most decisive change to the intellectual culture of the region over the last generation. But they have left an even more acute, indelible mark on law, language, and lived experience, in a manner that has revised the conditions of possibility through which Caribbean people conceive of their belonging and citizenship within their nation-states.

The meaning of Grenada, then, may well be otherwise than has been repeatedly articulated. Two outstanding recent studies of its revolution have—in their focus on the memory and meaning of the event—gone beyond the previous scholarship on it and posed challenging questions about how we perceive its aftermath. Shalini Puri’s contention in The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present is that past scholarship on the revolution, as illuminating as it has been, does not “address the subjective heart of things,” which her study, tracing the contemporary memory of the revolution, seeks to uncover.¹⁴ Puri notes that the fall of the revolution “paralyzed” the regional Left, but her study can be seen as working actively against that tale of angst and sorrow, partly by revealing the sheer resonances of Grenada in the life and thought of the region over the last thirty years. Puri frames her work as a “meditation on memory,” with the belief that the “best hopes for resolution and reconciliation in Grenada lie not in the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) or other state-led efforts but rather in everyday and artistic practices.”¹⁵ Uncovering tales of how people live with “deep disagreements” holds the promise not just of comprehending the weight of Grenada’s revolution, but a pathway to how Caribbean society might deal with difference in a number of spheres of existence.¹⁶ David Scott’s Omens of Adversity also recognizes the Grenada revolution as a “watershed event,” one that has been almost talismanic for a generation in the Caribbean.¹⁷ Scott’s interest is less in the memory of the event in the region than in “the temporality of the aftermaths of political catastrophe, the temporal disjunctures involved in living on in the wake of past political time, amid the ruins, specifically, of postsocialist and postcolonial futures past.”¹⁸ Scott accomplishes a difficult double—he both provides persuasive reconstructions of the events leading to the October 1983 catastrophic end of the revolution and the sham trial in its aftermath and takes the revolution’s history as the ground for a wider meditation on themes from political action to transnational justice. Both texts will doubtless elicit controversy, but the value of Puri’s and Scott’s contributions is that they have given Grenada a certain rest in our imagination.¹⁹ Rather than the turmoil and grief that Lamming speaks of in the above epigraph, Grenada becomes not a moment that marks the fatal diminution and end of the Anglophone Caribbean Left but a signal event in our ongoing attempt to craft a Caribbean future beyond our neocolonial present.

The focus of Beyond Coloniality on questions of citizenship and freedom puts it in conversation with a number of texts published in the region over the last generation, work both on citizenship and its exclusions and on the Caribbean intellectual tradition.²⁰ It is my view that in the current generation, we are seeing a series of social movements, individual actors, and pressure groups striving for a revised articulation of the contours of postcolonial citizenship.²¹ We might well see Anglophone Caribbean radical social and political thought in the era after the collapse of the Grenada revolution as occupying two broadly conceived and certainly overlapping traditions of thought. On one hand, a number of Caribbean thinkers have advanced a conceptual terminology—including the terms clientelism, false decolonization, and hegemonic dissolution—that has been highly influential for those interested in comprehending the character of the Caribbean postcolonial state. Another set of theorists, located within both regional and transnational circles and emergent in the last two decades, has been more consciously concerned with theorizing citizenship and its denials within the Caribbean state and has not only expanded previous understandings of the character of the colonial and postcolonial state but also posed searching questions about the limits of human freedom under coloniality. Neither of these trends is hermetically sealed off from the other, and Beyond Coloniality represents an effort to deliberately think of them in concert. The theoretical grounding of Beyond Coloniality lies within the radical Caribbean intellectual tradition that is its basis of study, which raises the question of what constitutes Caribbean theory.

The Search for a Caribbean Method

In a 2004 interview with Anthony Bogues, George Lammin...